Social Compass, XXV, 1978/1, 23-35

Ralph LANE Jr.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement

in the United States :
A Reconsideration

En se référant au concept de «routinisation», l’Auteur de

cet article met en question le caractère absolu et automatique
de ce processus selon lequel le mouvement du renouveau
charismatique serait appelé à s’institutionnaliser de la même
manière que les autres mouvements religieux.
C’est au départ d’une étude de cas que l’Auteur reconsidère
le problème: les processus de changement qui ont affecté
l’équipe centrale d’une communauté charismatique ont amené
celle-ci à décider la scission de la communauté initiale ; c’est
donc en termes structurels que le mouvement s’avère capable
de faire face au phénomène de la routinisation du charisme.

The emergence in the United States in 1967 of the Catholic Charismatic

Renewal (CCR) movement and its subsequent growth have been amply
documented by sociological outsiders as well as by participating insiders
who seem anxious to explain what is going on.’ Within the ranks of
sociologists there seems to have developed considerable consensus around
several different themes which bear repeating.

Origins and Nature

The began in the early part of 1967 at Duquesne University
movement
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among lay faculty and students who reported
having been filled with the Holy Spirit. Within a few months it had
spread, via networks of friendship, to the University of Notre Dame,
at South Bend, Indiana, and on to Michigan State University at East

1 The
bibliography cites most of the available work by sociologists in the United
States. Only some of it is cited in the body of the paper but I am indebted to all of
my sociological colleagues whose research and analysis has contributed to this paper.
The thesis that the CCR ought to be reconsidered and the case study research and
analysis are entirely my own. The only citations referring to insiders are those of
Ford, O’Connor, Clark, the Ranaghans, and Cavnar, although there is much more
available.

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Lansing and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Its growth rate
since then has been geometric in the United States and in many other
countries. Although there are no accurate estimates of total membership,
several thousand prayer groups are known to exist in the United States
alone. Its annual conventions at South Bend have drawn as many as
40,000 participants, which suggests a very large constituency. The
addition of international conferences and, in 1977, a well-publicized
interdenominational meeting at Kansas City, Missouri, are indicators of
the movements pervasiveness. The Kansas City meeting was, indeed,
a media event, largely because of its ecumenical flavor and the attendance
of such luminaries as President Carter’s sister, Jean Stapleton. It is
certainly safe to say that it has been the single most important movement
to have emerged within Roman Catholicism in the years since Vatican II.
The reasons for its appearance and rapid growth in the United States
have been tied to events which coincided in the 1960’s. On the one
hand, Vatican II seems to have served as a stimulus among Roman
Catholics for the kind of enthusiastic renewal which is identified with
CCR. At the same time neo-Pentecostalism was making itself felt in the
American Protestant denominational mainstream. Unlike classic Pente-
costalism, which had originated at the beginning of this century in
Topeka, Kansas, at a fundamentalist bible school, neo-Pentecostal and
Catholic Charismatic Renewal members are drawn from the middle class
and there is no attempt to convert people to a new sect. The sociological
literature frequently reiterates the point that the CCR is a movement,
expressive rather than instrumental.
This view of the CCR accords with the generally held sociological
position that religious movements in the United States have been
expressive. The born again Christians who have come into prominence
with the Carter administration are, in a sense, simple extensions of the
religious Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Social ob-
servers have remarked on the endemic quality of spiritual revivals in
the United States as responses to conditions of social upheaval and
cultural dislocation.

The American Background

Vatican II happened at a most peculiar time in the history of the
American society in general and of American Catholicism in particular.
World War II had been a watershed in many senses of the word. The
1950’s were a time of what appeared to be special fulfillment both for the
society and for the church. Optimism was most certainly the keynote,
the mood was definitely up-beat. If the promise of the American century
had been in doubt during the Great Depression before the war, the
major institutions of the society, family, economy, polity, educational
and religious enterprises, seem to have taken on added strength in spite
of those who had predicted, hopefully or not, their demise. The war
in Korea had never been popular, but, on the other hand, it had not

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pricked the public conscience or aroused emotional resistance as Vietnam
eventually would.
The rosy glow of optimism had not been dimmed as the society moved
into the 1960’s. The election of John F. Kennedy was perceived as a
victory not only for Catholics but a reaffirmation of important elements
in the American society. Robert Bellah, for example, has made much of
his innaugural speech as a benchmark in the unfolding of the American
Civil Religion. This conforms with Pin’s characterization in an earlier
issue of Social Compass, which was devoted almost entirely to Catholic
pentecostalism, of the years up to the mid-60’s as triumphalist as far as
the church in the United States was concerned.
The ensuing years were ones of disenchantment not only in the realm
of the secular but, perhaps most especially, for those who, in Clifford
Geertz’s apt phrase, see everything from the &dquo; religious perspective.&dquo;
There is abundant evidence that those most deeply involved in the CCR,
particularly in the ranks of the leadership, have consistently sought
solutions to ongoing problems of alienation through action in the religious
arena. For example, the Cursillo background of leadership at both
national and local levels of the CCR has been noted by a number of
observers. The thrust of such solutions clearly has not been in terms of
political activism. As Fichter (1975, p. 144) has put it: &dquo; The goal of
the renewal movement is personal spiritual reform, not organized social
reform, but this does not imply the absence of social concern. The
movement’s basic conviction is that a better society can emerge only
when people have become better, yet it would be completely erroneous
to interpret this as an individualistic and self-centered attitude.&dquo;

The Political Impact of the Movement

Although there seems to be essential agreement among sociological
observers that the movement is neither &dquo; individualistic &dquo; nor &dquo; self-
centered,&dquo; it has been misinterpreted as giving aid and comfort, so to
speak, to conservative political positions. As long ago as 1965, when neo-
Pentecostalism had just begun to diffuse itself throughout the mainline
Protestant denominations in the United States, a perceptive observer
cautioned that there was a tendency to confuse the religious fundamen.-
talism of the pentecostals with radical right wing political movements
(Elinson, 1965). Members of right wing movements are politically active
while pentecostals evangelize. If the action emphasis among the former
is on elections and legislation as means of stemming the tide of seer
larism, that of the pentecostals has been in the direction of personal
reformation as a strategy for waging the same battle. Both may be
in agreement that the current social order is breaking down, that the
prevailing social and political institutions are in a state of crisis, but
clearly the paneceas offered are of quite a different order.
Even though Elison’s paper was concerned with members of the classic
or traditional Pentecostal religions which had been flourishing for about
half a century among the lower and lower-middle socio-economic grou-

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pings in the United States, his findings have been substantiated by those
in the decade or so since who have been looking at neo-Pentecostals
and Catholic Charismatics. Fichter, for example, has documented the
wide range of social and political attitudes characteristic of his national
sample. The general sociological consensus seems to have been that, as
the movement is essentially appealing to the middle class, its member-
ship is representative of the liberal-conservative spectrum of that wider
class from which it is drawn. There is little evidence that the bulk of
American Catholics, of course, depart from this middle class mainstream.
This is not to say that the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, neo-Pente-
costalism, and the wide range of evangelical movements, most of whom
met together at the Kansas City meeting mentioned above, have no
identifiable political significance. They simply must be understood as
part of the woop-and-warf of the American political scene in which
middle-of-the-road, middle class pragmatism is seen not as compromise
with reactionary or conservative political movements, since they offer
no political reformist platforms, but as the triumph of virtues embedded
in the American Civil Religion.
To the extent that the development of the CCR accords with this
description, then it would be safe to predict that, regardless of current
levels of enthusiasm engendered by it and other born again impulses,
it will become routinized in the same fashion as earlier religious move-
ments in the United States, so that even when sects have emerged they
have become established. An intervening set of events, however, to which
insiders have been sensitive, suggests that a structural alternative within
the movement may, in fact, force sociologists to take a second look and
to reevaluate the direction of routinization.

A Structural Shift
Most sociological studies of CCR have called attention to, and the
insiders consciously foster, the distinction betwen core members and
those who attend the weekly prayer meetings. The latter may, in reality
be as pious or as committed to the pentecostal experience as core
members, but they are peripheral to the active maintenance of the
movement at the local or national level. Their concerns, in short, are
really not organizational. Core members are, for the most part, occupied
with the question of the framework within which personal spiritual reform
will take place. What follows is a case study of developments within
the core group in a single charismatic community. Following on its
presentation an attempt will be made to assess its significance.
In March, 1977, the leadership of the John the Baptist Renweal
Community, which had been the locus of an earlier study (Lane, 1972
and 1976), issued a press release announcing that the community would
cease operation in San Francisco and that plans were underway to move
the bulk of the core members to join the People of Praise community
in South Bend, Indiana. The announcement was the culmination of a
series of events which had beset this particular community. However,

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these events are of sociological interest because they are symptomatic
of a more widespread conflict in the 10 year old Catholic Charismatic
Renewal movement in the United States.
John the Baptist community had been formed in early 1970, apparently
the first in the San Francisco Bay Area, by some persons who had
studied at Notre Dame. Although it has retained considerable influence
in the ensuing years as a kind of regional &dquo; mother church,&dquo; its own
core group of members had reached a numerical plateau early on, or
at least grew at a decelerating rate after the first flush of success. At
least a year before the March, 1977, announcement, and probably for
a longer period according to informants’ accounts, strains had been de-

veloping as a result of positions with respect to future directions taken

by those in upper echelons of leadership and influence in the community.
The split was occurring along he lines described in a recen work by
J. Massyngberde Ford (1976). Ford, herself, had been an active member
of the Notre Dame community and a member of that University’s
theology faculty. Her account of the split is quite partisan, since she
plainly allies herself with Type II, but as descriptive categories the
typology is workable. Those whom Ford would classify as Type II
have a more accomodative posture vis-a-vis the church as an institution
as well as the institutions of the wider society ; those in her Type I
appear to be more critical of the society and, most especially, of what
they see as a very serious decline in the influence of the post-Vatican II
church. As a consequence, the latter advocate the formation of covenanted
communities, i.e., communities which live according to a rule and which
are more insulated from the surrounding milieu. Views on the form
of authority, the nature of ecumenism, the role of women, and a number
of other issues are also at stake, but the relationship to the world is
more relevant both to this paper and to general sociological concerns.
To begin to put the San Francisco developments into perspective, it
should be said that the seeds for the split were sewn within the movement
early in its development. Thus, even if the factionalism did not break
out in the open in San Francisco until the last few years, this is not
to say that it had not been emerging much earlier. The San Francisco
community must have been influenced by developments at Ann Arbor
and South Bend, with both of which it maintained close personal ties in
the reticulate form observed to be characteristic of the movement. So
many of the founding fathers or elder statesmen of the movement have
been located in both those communities that they have nourished an elite
which, despite considerable controversy surrounding it, has steadfastly
maintained what may be described as a radical set of Type I prescriptions
with respect to church reform. They have argued for the formation of
communities effectively insulated but not isolated from the influence of
the secular society, to use a distinction employed by Brian Wilson (1959).
In reaction to the intense, exclusivist or closed character of these
communities there is pressure within the movement for more accomodative
positions to be voiced. One indicator of this is the emergence in 1975
of a new national publication, Catholic Charismatic, published by the
Paulist Press and containing articles more frequently authored by clergy

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and bypersons outside the movement who may have inspirational
comments to make. In the view of Type II informants in San Francisco
this publication serves as an effective antidote to New Covenant, which
has been the &dquo; official &dquo; movement publication for half a dozen years.
It comes out of Ann Arbor and tends to reflect the Type I line.
In late 1976 and early 1977 the perception on the part of some of
the leaders that the San Francisco community was not growing in
numbers and that disunity over goals and other issues as well had
interfered with potential growth, in the qualitative sense as a cohesive
community, led the leaders to earnest discussion among themselves.
These discussions were accompanied with an intensification of prayer,
individually and collectively, seeking &dquo; guidance from the Lord &dquo; to
help them discern the direction the community ought to take.
A word should be said here about the importance the leadership at-
taches to discernment as a decision making process, inspired, as they
see it, by the Holy Spirit. They take very seriously what they consider
to be their election as leaders and are concerned with the problem of
their own legitimacy. After all, it reflects in turn on the legitimacy of
the decisions they make in the name of the entire community.
At no time was this striving for legitimacy and normality more evident
than in a discussion with one informant about the circumstances sur-
rounding the specific decision to move the entire community the
2000 miles from San Francisco to South Bend. The prayers and dis-
cussions among the leaders, initially inchoate, rapidly coalesced, as
the informant recalls, around the possibility of leaving San Francisco and
moving either to Ann Arbor or to South Bend. The first person to &dquo;
broach the subject prefaced his remarks with : You may think this is off
the wall, but...&dquo;. All apparently agreed that such a move might seem
too extreme or radical a solution to what they felt were becoming in-
soluble problems within the community. Nevertheless they consented to
reflect on the idea and to pray over it further.
One of the indicators, to those engaged in discerning, that an idea’s
time has come or that a proposed course of action has the blessing of
the Lord is the effect they have on participants. If they create personal
or collective discord then they probably are not from the Lord. In this
case, after a few days’ prayer and reflection among the leaders, or at
least among those who had been expressing dissatisfaction with the
state of affairs in the John the Baptist Renewal Community, the idea
of the move seemed increasingly attractive and appropriate to them.
Correspondence and telephone conversations with persons of influence
in the Ann Arbor and South Bend communities played a positive role
in the discerning process. Since they, too, seemed fairly receptive to
and encouraging of the move, this was interpreted, according to the
informant, as a reinforcing sign that the move would have the Lord’s
blessing.
The specific choice of South Bend appears to have been made in
terms of what the leaders perceived as both a push and a pull. There
is an immediately recognizable methodological difficulty in accepting
at face value the validity of any informant’s ex post facto reconstruction.

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This would seem especially the where the leaders, even by their
case
own admission, areattempting to their decisions in the face
legitimize
of considerable opposition. The point here, though, is not so much
whether the reconstruction assembles all the relevant facts or includes
dissenting points of view. Rather, the content of reconstruction affords
clues with respect to what leaders perceive as important elements in
decision making. In short, what did the leaders think was pushing them
out of San Francisco and what did they feel was pulling them to
South Bend ?
With respect to the push, there are several items, one of which refers
to Ford’s Type I-Type II distinction and the split which had developed
in the John the Baptist Renewal Community along these lines. Those
Ford would classy as Type I are, in the San Francisco case and
most probably elsewhere, lay men who had been in leadership roles in
the prayer group right from the beginning. Initially they had worked
closely with members of religious orders, one of whom was liaison to
the local ordinary. At least a year, and probably longer as indicated,
before the move the lay men were pressing more and more for
the transformation of the core members of the prayer group into a more
identifiable community which, as indicated above, would be governed
by a covenant or rule. The latter would be comparable to that
which obtains in religious orders and had already been achieved at
Ann Arbor and South Bend and, presumably, at other places. These lay
leaders were willing to go on providing the weekly prayer meeting as
&dquo;

a kind of spiritual service station,&dquo; but they saw the mission of the
core group as creation and maintenance of a community in which members
could have more total involvement in each other’s lives.
Type II persons, predominantly though not exclusively from clerical
ranks, argued for the centrality of the prayer meetings and the spin-off
educational and inspirational activities which from Ford’s point of view
are, at once, much more &dquo;... flexible and less structured.&dquo;, and more
&dquo;... fully integrated with the theology and sacramentality of the con-
temporary Catholic church..&dquo; Type I participants fear that if, the
maintenance of the Saturday night prayer meetings becomes the chief
function served by the core group, their energies will be directed to
preserving the modern equivalents of novenas, benediction, and other
devotional activities which were pervasive in pre-conciliar days.
Furthermore, from the Type I perspective, the Type II position lends
itself to cooptation by the going ecclesiastical institutional structures.
This is a crucial issue both in terms of authority and the way in which
communities can be structured. We will return to this, but suffice to
say here that Type I leaders are suspicious of just where clerical loyalties
lie. That clerics, at least in the San Francisco case, seemed more ready
to espouse the Type II position is seen by Type I persons as further
testimony of the correctness of their suspicions.
Not only was there the influence of the Type II advocates which was
felt to make difficult the creation of a covenated community, but resi-
dential propinquity is difficult to achieve given the economics of home
buying in the San Francisco Bay Area. Having housing adjacent to one
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another is seen as a necessary, though clearly not sufficient, condition
for creating a communal cluster of couples, their children, and single
persons who either share quarters among themselves or live with
community couples. As it turned out, the same difficulty did not present
itself in the South Bend area. In fact, prior to moving at the beginning
of the summer of 1977, there had been purchased or there were
plans to buy housing in a single neighborhood which, it was hoped, might
accomodate the 80 or so adults and their children who were expected
to go to South Bend. This, of course, was one of the pull factors and
was interpreted, according to one informant, as a further sign of the

rightness of the decision to move.

Attention has been given to this matter of housing to underscore the
earlier remarks with relation to discernment. It is a process, as has been
intimated, which hinges on ordinary, mundane events for supportive
evidence not the least important of which, in a secular world, is economic
feasibility. In the same vein, consideration had been given to the relative
merits of Ann Arbor as over against South Bend. The sheer size of
the Ann Arbor community, now somewhat over 1000 persons living in
a fairly close community, was judged to be less able to absorb in any

meaningful way the San Francisco transplants. The South Bend com-
munity has no more than 400 persons and was deemed more flexible
in accepting an influx of persons needing jobs and housing.
The final push factor was asserted to be the secular character or
ambience of San Francisco, which was interpreted in the words of
a Type I informant as militating
against the formation of a Christian
community. This conforms with the idea expressed in a recent editorial
in New Covenant that &dquo;... modern secularism is the real opiate of the
people.&dquo; This as a rationale for the move deserves some comment since
it is presumably a view of the world shared by all involved in religious
renewal, charismatic or otherwise. What merits attention here is the
consequent prescription for action. In opposition to secularization it calls
for a strategic withdrawal from the place in which efforts to create a
sense of Christian community have fallen on fallow, or, perhaps, hostile
ground. This would seem to represent a major departure from the general
way in which American Catholics have confronted the world around
them. Even while the faithful were being warned at the beginning of
the century about the dangers of Modernism and the Americanist
tendencies were being denounced, clergy and laity alike were fully engaged
in assimilating themselves to the mainstream.
It is not a matter, of course, of whether South Bend really affords
a more salubrious spiritual climate than San Francisco. Without in-

tending to indulge in civic rivalry, it is hard to believe that it does.

Its pull in this case is a question of the kind of milieu it is perceived
to have by those leaving San Francisco, in terms of the kind of life
they are trying to construct for themselves. The economic feasibility of
residential propinquity has already been mentioned as an element im-
portant to them in realizing the milieu. The shared experience of leaving
San Francisco and attempting to build a community in South Bend
presumably, in itself, should go a long way to creating and sustaining
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the sought for of community. In that sense, South Bend, as
feeling
such, is not important, though it has been a vital national center
even
of the CCR.
Those moving from San Francisco have fully expected to be caught
up in staffing service functions provided for the movement nationwide
and abroad through organizational offices in South Bend, which work
in close cooperation with Ann Arbor. For some of the San Francisco
group this literally would be a source of gainful employment. For others
it would be a focus of activity which could become the basis of that
desired shared experience with a larger number than exists in San
Francisco.
This latter factor seems central to understanding both push and pull
for it suggests that these active charismatics have been in search of a
specially insulated locus in which they can act out their commitment.
This is quite a different impulse than that of the Type II members
who have remained behind. These latter should be divided into two
groups, clergy who were more or less formally excluded from moving by
the Type I leadership, and the laity who either chose not to go or were
discouraged by those planning the move. In both cases, from the Type I
perspective and, probably, from their own as well, the move would have
created ambiguities for them and would have affected the coherence of
the group. Harrison ( 1974b) employed the notion of competing com-
mitment as an important variable to account for those who would be
recruited initially to the pentecostal experience and to the CCR. He
suggested that those whose life was characterized by competing commit-
ments, such as careers, marriage, more settled life style, would be the
least likely to be recruited. The same phenomenon appears to be at
work here. The kind of community which Type I persons have in mind
involves commitment to the maintenance of the group itself, not just
the fellowship of those who share a common cultic experience.
The application to lay persons is fairly obvious. Many are married
to persons who, themselves, are not charismatics. Their stake in jobs
or home or commitment to friends, a kind of social inertia rather than

potential for mobility, may describe their unwillingness to be uprooted

and transplanted in search of a new form of community. The case of
the clergy is somewhat different, in that it hinges on what the Type I
persons see as the conflicting organizational loyalties encountered by
the person who owes allegiance to a religious superior. As mentioned
above, in the San Francisco case, the Type I leadership doubted that
the clergy would be willing or able to choose to submit to their
authority.

Assessing the Significance

It is this emphasis on the group at a new organizational level that
emerges from this narrative as having the most significant impact of
sociological interest. Notice that in South Bend the members are still
expecting to be engaged in service maintaining functions. However, the
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shift in the organizational level of their endeavors has opened up the
possibility of a organizational
new form for the group itself, and at
the same time it could portend a change in the manner in which the CCR
is effective in the church and, ultimately, in the wider society.
Ford is especially concerned with Type I developments in three areas,
viz., the structure of the covenanted communities which she views as
authoritarian and exclusivist, the relationship to the hierarchical authority
of the church which she sees as potentially schismatic, and the apparent
lack of social action concern which she feels is essentially un-Christian.
Practices with which she was familiar in a covenanted community at
True House in South Bend had alarmed her and she has vigorously
expressed her concern on many subsequent occasions. She reports that
she has been unable to establish communication with the Type I Leader-
ship, intimating their unwillingness to accept informed criticism. The
substance of the events involving True House were reported in a series
of articles in National Catholic Reporter (Casey, 1975). She likens
the Type I model to the Anabaptists, the Radical Reformers of the
sixteenth century. As partial proof of this assertion, she notes deprecating-
ly what others have observed, i.e., the influence on Type I charismatics
of Benjamin Zablocki’s The Joyful Community. Yet to understand this
influence, it is important to examine the position of the Type I leadership.
Trying to build what they call a Christian community is perceived
by them -as an especially perplexing task since there are few readily
available models of lay communities which, from their point of view, are
applicable to the contemporary world. The experiences of the Bruderhof,
as reported by Zablocki (1971), are in some ways paradigmatic. Type I
leaders make reference to those experiences precisely because they
hope to profit by the difficulties the Bruderhof experienced. The diffi.-
culties in forming and maintaining intentional communities are dealt
with by Zablocki in a critical fashion which is instructive but, like
Kanter’s work (1972) on both 19th and 20th century communities, his
approach is both sympathetic and optimistic. One suspects that Za-
blocki’s work serves as an unofficial handbook as much because of the
encouragement it offers as for the developmental guideposts it might
contain.
Without taking sides in the matter, there is no doubt that Type I
leaders have felt the necessity for ruthless measures in order to create
the tightly knit communities they feel will be viable in the long run.
Manuals and tapes produced mainly be prominent spokesmen at Ann
Arbor and South Bend, and available from the Communications Center
at the latter, frequently address the control problems of the covenanted
communities. There is no hidden agenda, so to speak, and their position
has been well known for a number of years. It seems likely, if the am-
bitions imputed to them by one informant are realized, that the Type I
leadership imagines the communities can become a new type of religious
order, perhaps unthinkable in the pre-conciliar world. They are striving
to innovate in what they define as the call for renewal of Vatican II and
they feel that only disciplined zealots can survive the pressure which
such innovations involve.

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 The pressure parallels Ford’s three areas of concern. First, the cor
venanted communities face much the same problem of internal control
as all religious orders. Having been socialized in a world which puts

great emphasis on individual achievement, it is necessary for the recruit

to become a new person to accede to the authority of the group. Also,
since members of the covenanted communities of the CCR work at a
variety of daily jobs, frequently unrelated to other community members
geographically and functionally, the problem is compounded. From the
outside, one is tempted to say that this could produce a daily exercise in
schizophrenia for many members unless appropriate modes of socialization
to this new situation are worked out. In addition, the fact that some
also have the prior affective ties of marriage poses control problems
obviously not faced in celibate orders. A few of those who moved to
South Bend have returned to San Francisco in the ensuing months. The
Type II adherents have sometimes interpreted this to mean that the
community in South Bend is failing and that they were right not to go.
However much this assuages their feelings, it may be a premature analysis
of what will happen. Religious orders have always lost recruits because
the postulants have resented the regime imposed upon them or, for one
reason or another, have decided it is not for them. Type I leadership is
frank in admitting that many of its efforts at control have been heavy
handed but they defend them on the grounds of necessary experimentation
and their own inexpertise. The discerning process goes on among them
as a means of ensuring them that they are on the right path.
Second, there is external pressure which centers on the mode in which
the covenanted communities will conform to the hierarchical church.
Here, again, the Type I leadership has expressed its desire to remain
within the fold and to search for new ways in which lay persons can
relate to the church. Ford is critical of them because they do not seem
agreeable to accepting what they see as the status quo. They are, by her
admisssion, impatient with the pallid lack of initiative of the post-conciliar
church. She berates them for shunning clerical guidance, but they choose
to be selective about which clerical guidance and at which level. Coley
man (1976, p. 26) evaluates the situation quite differently than Ford
&dquo;

when he comments : The story of lay renewal movements in the

United States has exhibited a repetitive pattern of fragmentation, loss of
vigor and deep ambiguity about whether to focus on an agenda directed
toward inner renewal of the church or outer influence on the wider
society. This has been true in recent years of both the Cursillo movement
and the underground church ... A rapid mobilization of the laity along
socio-expressive lines has, time and again foundered on the shoals of
the intransigent parish which results in a sapping sense of the absence
of any greater purpose vis...à~vis diocesan or national church goals. One
of the exciting structural developments in the current Catholic pente-
costal movement -
I will prescind from any evaluation of the movement
in terms of its expressive, religious purposes is that the movement
-

has, thus far, been able to develop its own semi-autonomous national,
regional and diocesan-wide structures under lay leadership and has
avoided the trap of being sucked into the fragmenting vortex of the

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parish. Several such structurally autonomous lay movements would seem
necessary if the American laity is to exert any leverage upon the church
in its present crisis.
This brings the final area of Ford’s concern. Interestingly, she
us to
cites Fichter’s work as documentation that the CCR has not been
sufficiently concerned with social action, although his remarks quoted
earlier suggest that he appreciates the dilemma which the movement
faces. It is the ambiguity mentioned by Coleman concerning choice of
agenda, inner renewal or outer influence on the wider society. The Type I
adherents unabashedly opt for the inner renewal, but they have shifted
the structural level at which they choose to act. It remains to be seen
seen whether this strategy works. Meanwhile, it seems foolhardy if socio-

logical observers dismiss them for not having accomplished more or

different things. The studies by Kanter and by Zablocki suggest that
we keep them very much on our research agenda.

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